THE
ROLE OF SATURN ON
THE SPIRITUAL PATH-by Joyce Hoen
DF Astrol S-(This article
was previously published in the Astrological Journal, UK,
Spring issue 2001 )
-article only
suitable for those well versed in astrology-

Recently
I read the biography of a Sufi practitioner who started his book by
saying that Sufism basically knows three Paths: the path away from
God, the path to God and the path in God. Sufism is a mystical
tradition where God is the Beloved in the heart; it is about merging
with the Divine Love. While reading this, I thought: "Wait a
minute, what a wonderful way to describe the three cycles of Saturn in
a lifetime!" The first 29.6 years of our lives we usually spend
'away from the Source' which can (but does not always need to) change
dramatically during the first Saturn-return, after which we slowly but
surely become 'seekers', more and more attuned to our inner lives
which could be called the 'Path to God'.

Paramahansa Yogananda who lived for just 2 Saturn cycles (he died
during his 2nd Saturn return), never even spent the first 29.6 years
of his life 'away from God': --reading his
"Autobiography"--, he tried practically from his birth
onwards to consciously return to the Source and seek God, so he
already spent the first Saturn cycle 'on the Path to God'. Many people
not on the spiritual path spend their third Saturn cycle (58-83 yrs)
more and more 'in Neptune country', unconnected to Saturn (time, space
and the laws of this life on Earth): they slowly experience a split
between body and spirit, developing Alzheimer and dementia. Others
manage to integrate the timelessness with Saturn and experience great
peace: they radiate wisdom during their third Saturn cycle. As
mentioned, not all people consciously or unconsciously turn into
seekers after their 1st Saturn-return, but many do, in one way or
another.

Halfway during the 2nd Saturn cycle we experience in a short time span
both the Saturn-opposition as well as the Neptune-Neptune square.
These transits, occurring somewhere between ages 42 and 45, follow a
period of many transformations with Pluto and Uranus transits which
people currently experience between the age of 35-36 and 42 as a first
since its discovery, now that Pluto is so close (relatively speaking)
to the Sun and moving so fast (relatively speaking again) through the
zodiac (the peak of which occurred during the early nineties). I
believe that the period between ages 42 and 45, the period of the
transiting Neptune square to Neptune and the 2nd Saturn opposition, is
for many people already a transition into the experience of living the
Path 'in God' so to speak. I once heard a lecture by Alan Oken where
one thing he said struck me deeply. He said: "Before your transit
of Neptune square Neptune you are seeking God, but after it God seeks
you".

Once I had this very down-to-earth consultation with an alternative
healer, which drives this point home in a very succinct manner. She
came for a consultation because she was so incredibly busy, and
worried about having no time for herself anymore. She thought she
needed to make some choices. The year before that, she had started a
practice in Belgium with her husband, a medical doctor, which
flourished right from the start. She loved the work they were doing
together and in fact; she was radiant when I saw her. But she had this
problem of no longer having any time for herself. I looked at her
chart and saw that she was by that time well beyond her
Neptune-square-Neptune transit - the last one had occurred some 9
months before. I looked at her and told her: "What do you mean,
you have no time for yourself? Isn't it precisely your Self who is
doing this work and loving every minute of it? You have entered a new
stage in life, where you should stop your old way of thinking, the way
of thinking of people on the path still 'seeking the Source', where
spirit and matter are split and seen as two different things. Yes, you
used to live in a consciousness where there was time for 'your self'
and time 'for work'. But these things have now become one. Your work
is an expression of yourself. Change your vocabulary now. You do not
need any time for your self, because all your time is from your Self
and you love every minute of it. The work is seeking you, the creative
life-force is seeking you now, you no longer need to look for it
yourself; your self and your Self are one."

And this is, I think, the great difference between the first stages on
the spiritual path, when 'Neptune and Saturn' are not integrated yet,
and the later stages on the spiritual path, the 'Path in God', when
things just are the way they are and nothing needs to be sought
anymore. And all of this is nothing else but a change in
consciousness, not even necessarily a change in the outer
circumstances of one's life. We can feel tremendous inner pain by
becoming conscious of the split between spirit and matter; we can
feel imprisoned by the realities of this earthly existence and seek
for something greater than ourselves. This is in fact a wonderful
stage, the stage of the spiritual seeker. In this stage we become
acutely aware of Saturn and the need to transform it, making it more
transparent, so that at least some of the timelessness, universal
compassion and love of Neptune, the universal heart, can shine
through. And we work on ourselves, or rather life works on us, as we
go through transit after transit ever more consciously after our first
Saturn-return. And then one day, lo and behold, whether set off by a
chain of incredibly traumatic experiences or subtly and all by itself,
one day we are at peace with ourselves and find our destiny on this
planet, not away from it, and Neptune and Saturn are integrated: the
eternal and time itself are the same.

If this hypothesis is all true, or even to some extent only, it means
that Saturn plays a tremendously important role on our spiritual path,
because it is only by means of Saturn that we can come to grasp
anything of the trans-Saturnian realm. In astrology many people equate
'spirituality' with Neptune and all its other derivatives. When we
seek the less confined more exalted states of being, for instance in
trance, by means of drugs or even alcohol, we all try to fly to
Neptune, transcending or even forgetting about Saturn, and
consequently our fall back to Saturn is hard and very painful. In
fact, seeking Neptune without taking Saturn along is part of the
'split' and a guarantee for encountering problems on the path.
And this applies to much more mundane everyday situations in life too.

Regardless of the three Saturn-cycles, or perhaps I should say,
parallel to it, we have within ourselves three qualities of Saturn.
The first quality is where we try to close ourselves off from anything
that we cannot comprehend, narrowing our focus to the truths we can
perceive with the senses only. Oftentimes this ends up as a Saturn who
needs to regulate everything outside of us, we harden and tend to be
chaotic on the inside at the same time. This Saturn-quality is pretty
'thick'. We can also ignore Saturn altogether, and adhere to the
flight-mechanisms, seeking relief in alcohol, drugs or other escapist
things. Being an escapist actually means literally this: escaping from
Saturn! This Saturn-quality is pretty 'thin' as in ignored. (With
Saturn placements in the 8th or the 12th it can become quite easy to
escape it, though this certainly isn't true for everybody). It may
result in blaming the whole world for our experiences, i.e. not taking
responsibility for ourselves but feeling ourselves victims (Saturn in
the 8th negatively speaking). Neptune is pretty strong here, but
Saturn is projected outside and weak inside.

The third quality, the quality of the middle way perhaps, is a Saturn
which does take responsibility for itself and refines itself in such a
way that more and more of the higher vibrations can be channeled
THROUGH the Saturn world of the here and now. If we transpose these
three Saturn qualities to our experience of time itself - Saturn
equals timing in the first place - we get the state where Saturn is
always experienced in relation to past pain and hurt (1), or connected
to distant goals in the future (2), or again the middle way, the
crossroad between past and future: the here and now (3). If one
studies charts of people who (for instance) need a lot of alcohol to
survive, it is quite easy to find the Neptune factors involved in such
a chart. Neptunian people are in reality people who are seeking the
divine. The key is however to allow the divine to manifest in the here
and the now THROUGH our Saturn-ego-content. In charts of alcoholics
you will consistently find that the Capricorn and Saturn content is
difficult to identify with (i.e. to take responsibility for their own
journey). Capricorn and/or Saturn might indeed be connected with the
8th or 12th house for instance (houses that we do not identify with as
'being our own').

Saturn is the crux of the matter with all Neptunian things in life,
not so much Neptune, is what I am merely trying to say. All the trans-Saturnian
forces need to operate THROUGH our Saturn-content to make it workable
in our every day lives. The path of aligning the ego with the higher
Self is not an easy one. Saturn is not too friendly towards the ego,
as we all know. We all know what insecurity means. We all know what it
means to be put down by someone else and how this hurts (it is the ego
which gets hurt). We tend to experience this the easiest in those
areas of life connected with the houses ruled by Saturn and/or where
Saturn is placed. In the first 30 years of our lives Saturn (and our
ego) needs to be built UP, we need support from authorities (Saturn)
outside of ourselves. But this changes after 29.6 and yet, most people
still give other people the authority to approve and justify their
acts. The fear of failure in the eyes of someone else, insecurity and
needing approval are extremely interesting dynamics. If I am sensitive
to what others say about whatever it might be that I am sensitive
about, it means I give my Saturn away to others. This is fine if I am
not yet 30 years of age, but then something should really change. And
yet, so often do we fail to understand this truth, even if life is
trying to beat it into us.

The whole astrology world, at least in the USA right now, so anxious
for outer acceptance by society, is in fact an example of the same
dynamic. If we are insecure about our astrology, yes we DO need
acceptance from the outer world, because how else are we going to
atone this insecurity? - we reason. But think about the following for
a moment: say you were born with Capricorn on the 6th house cusp and
Saturn in the 5th house. You may be pretty sensitive about your work
methods and may need to reconcile this by being ambitious, working
hard and yet, all this for just a single reason (a goal in the
'future'): to become accepted by your superiors. Of course, with
Capricorn on the 6th house cusp, you are finding out that nobody sees
the amount of work you put into something and you don't feel you get
the recognition you think you so deserve. All these dynamics are fine
for someone in the first Saturn-cycle, but for all those who are
older: reflect for a moment on what happens if someone DOES recognize
you? What happens, is in fact that you will not believe it! You
will start to minimize your own efforts all of a sudden, or doubting
whether the other person actually means it. You will continuously
doubt yourself in all the areas related to Saturn and Capricorn!
Whatever other people say!

I tend to tell my clients that there is one area in their life where
they will not gain any approval from others, where they are on their
own, the area related to Capricorn and Saturn in their charts. And I
tell them: "you see, it does not matter what someone else says,
because Saturn stays a pain in the ass as long as you project the
thing onto someone else, or a system outside of yourself. Saturn is in
reality not the outer authority, it is an inner authority. It is your
own conscience whose approval you unknowingly are seeking, and our own
conscience is the first gate to God indeed." Therefore it does
not help whether someone outside approves or disapproves. Yet, how
difficult it is to listen to our inner conscience, because the truth
is, we judge ourselves so much harsher than anybody else ever would.
Yes Saturn is kind of harsh for the ego, but in truth not for the
Soul, to the contrary. To make this turn-around is in fact to change
from karma to dharma. From burdens on our backs to walking the path in
the here and now. Firm yet flexible, the 3rd Saturn-quality.